I suppose there are people who might be surprised to find themselves getting solid economic analysis from a food blogger. I am not one of them. I’ve actually been waiting for this moment since March.
Deb Perelman is one of my favorite food bloggers. Her blog, Smitten Kitchen, details her adventures cooking for her growing family in an impossibly tiny kitchen in New York City. She has a great reputation for funny writing, great photos, and reliable and delicious recipes. (I am NOT kidding about the coffee cake.)
But last week, she did something a little different. In the business section of today’s New York Times, Perelman has a great piece titled, “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. You Can’t Have Both.” The article is a testament from a working mom with two young children and a husband who has been laid off, who is trying to hold everything together through the pandemic. And she’s just been told that the coming school year–the promise of which has been a beacon of sanity for parents everywhere–will, in her area, have her children attending physical school one week out of every three.
Perelman’s article, which you should read immediately, is not the kind of anguished, inchoate cry we have been led to expect by articles that focus on parental burnout, exhaustion, and stress. Certainly, that frustration is in her article as well. But the article is about the economic costs of her school district’s choice, analyzed by someone who is in the middle of experiencing them. She writes:
As I said, I’ve been waiting for this moment. I have a history of fascination with economic thinking as expressed in non economic works–and particularly with the economic thinking of people who are in the daily grit of working blue collar jobs and doing household work. I think their diaries and letters and interviews and books of advice tell us at least as much about the economic circumstances under which they were written as do articles by economists–probably more.
This is why I spend a lot of time with books like Round About a Pound a Week, All Our Kin, Working, and How to Run Your Home Without Help. All of these works give us direct access to the lived experience of people managing daunting economic circumstances. They let us SEE people thinking economically, rather than leaving us to surmise from a distance.
I think Perelman is right about the unsustainable nature of the burdens–financial, educational, social, and psychological–that working parents are being asked to carry right now. I think she is right that New York City’s plan for schoolchildren to have one week on/two weeks off is an absolute disaster. More important than that, though, I think her voice, and the voices of countless other bloggers, diarists, and letter writers like her, are vital economic data that can help us think more clearly about policy now, and will help us have a better understanding of the tribulations of 2020 when it is a matter of economic history.
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Jul 7 2020 at 10:56pm
First, I think this sentence is right on the nose: “[books about home economics] let us SEE people thinking economically…” It’s not some mysterious process. Consumer decisions are often very open to analysis.
Second, I think this coming period will be a masterclass in *what the value of school consists in*. If kids want learning, really there is more material, of extraordinarily high quality, available just on YouTube than anyone could ever get through in a lifetime. But learning has, I suggest, only ever been part of the value of schools as an institution. They teach, they socialise, and they child-mind, and exactly what the relative values of those three functions are is something that merits a lot of very close examination.
SaveyourSelf
Jul 8 2020 at 8:40am
@Phil H: By “child-mind” do you mean babysit? If not, I would add that to your list.
@Sarah Skwire: You wrote, “I have a history of fascination with economic thinking as expressed in non economic works…” This is an extremely evocative sentence. It struck me both emotionally and intellectually. It made me wonder and want to know more. Well said.
Sarah Skwire
Jul 8 2020 at 9:51am
Thanks, SaveYourSelf!
You can find a lot of the writing I’ve done about economics in non economic texts just by googling my name. And here’s a link to a Cato Unbound essay from a few years back that outlines a part of my thinking on the topic.
S.
Mary Pat Campbell
Jul 9 2020 at 8:10am
Howdy Sarah — sorry if this is a little off the wall, but are you a relation of the actuary Dan Skwire?
The reason I mention this is he’s written articles about actuarial issues in classic literature for actuarial publications (specifically Dickens & Austen), and it makes me think of what you described in reading economics from non-econ texts.
Sarah Skwire
Jul 8 2020 at 9:47am
Thanks, Phil!
Coming soon: A list of book recs from me on books that are loaded with economic thinking that aren’t “about economics.”
And agreed re: school. One of the things the pandemic shut down has made explicit for a lot of us is the whole range of things that schools do for kids–in both good and bad ways. I’m a big fan of online learning, and think it can work really well for lots of kids in lots of ways. But I also think (especially for the kids I live with) that it works best as a complement to in-person learning rather than as a substitute for it. And that’s just the learning part of what kids get from school–doesn’t address, as you say, the social and child-minding functions.
Mary Pat Campbell
Jul 9 2020 at 9:21am
I look forward to that reading list — I’ve found plenty in classic literature, esp. my fave authors Dickens & Austen… as I’m an actuary (and I’ve enjoyed your brother Dan’s pieces in actuarial publications on those topics).
I’m on a Trollope reading kick right now, and there’s definitely a lot of info on the home economics of small town Anglican clergy in the mid-19th century in there. Thinking through the practicalities of how to get an income, raise children, and do more… has long been an interest since the invention of the novel.
Deirdre Nansen McCloskey
Jul 8 2020 at 10:11am
Brilliant and humane as usual. If we don’t see economics in Life, we don’t see it at all.
Michael
Aug 3 2020 at 5:48pm
Deidre,
” If we don’t see economics in Life, we don’t see it at all.”
Yes, indeed! This is exactly what drew me to major in Economics at university. And it has provided ongoing fascination and stood me in good stead ever since.
Cheers…
Michael
Sarah Skwire
Jul 8 2020 at 10:25am
Thank you! There’s been a lot of work by literary scholars and historians on this kind of personal domestic material in the early modern era. (I don’t know, off-hand, of a lot by economists, perhaps because of the devaluation of economic history as a whole?) I think if I were a young economist in search of a research topic I might be inclined to stake a claim on this kind of material from the COVID19 era.
Carole
Jul 8 2020 at 10:46am
Like most things in our society, the workaday people are generally taken for granted by the talking heads. Rarely do they have the ability, en masse, to show their power. This coming 12-24 months will put that power on display, I believe. There are currently a thousand plus ways this can all go very badly for our country. The masses will respond or not respond according to quality of leadership those in charge show. (Currently we are seeing that dynamic play out in the civil unrest in some of our biggest cities. Poor leadership results in the kind of chaos we are seeing. Economically it has been a DISASTER it will take decades to recover from.)
Most parents I know are not at all interested in sending their children back to public schools in this environment. They are rearranging their lives in order to make alternative education arrangements for their kids- homeschooling, learning co-ops, online options. I even know some who are banding together to hire teachers, who too are not excited to go back to what’s being proposed, to help coordinate post-public school learning opportunities.
Going forward, at least for the foreseeable future, our lives will not look like the recent past. People will make decisions that on the face may not seem economic, but are very much tied to the value they place on the components of their lives. I think there will be a great reordering.
David Henderson
Jul 8 2020 at 12:29pm
Nicely done, Sarah.
MarkW
Jul 8 2020 at 5:53pm
I have this hope (which I expect to be dashed) that this situation might bring something of a return to the free-range kid model of child rearing. When I was a kid in the 70s (yes, here we go), it wasn’t uncommon for mothers — during school vacations — to kick their kids out of the house and tell them not to come back until lunch or dinner time. And even when we were all inside, it was in somebody’s basement and their mother was paying us as little mind as possible and wouldn’t hesitate to kick us all out if we got too loud.
One of the charms of Stranger Things, amid all the supernatural happenings, was the very realistic portrayal of how packs of kids wandered far and wide in their towns with their parents having little or no idea where they were at any given time. It doesn’t have to be impossible to work and look after school aged children (I know, I’ve done it myself during summers when my kids were younger). In the not-so-distant past, housework was <i>real</i> work (washtubs, clothes lines, sewing machines, weeding the garden, canning, beating rugs, stoking the coal furnace and wood stove, pumping and carrying water, cleaning soot and coal dust, etc) and it all got done with many more children per family than we have now.
Phil H
Jul 8 2020 at 7:55pm
“Hope…free-range kid model”
That would be a lovely outcome. I don’t believe it will happen, either, but it could. There’s less traffic about, and roads are safer. Play parks are better. Fear of Covid inhibited free-range play during our lockdown, but this summer I will be sending mine out of the house. Unfortunately their friends tend to spend every waking minute in academic classes (we live in middle class China).
Michael
Aug 3 2020 at 5:55pm
Just excellent, Sarah. Very much looking forward to your upcoming list of book recs with “economic thinking that aren’t about economics.”
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